The FINAL blog for BMI 502 -2009

I thought it might be good to blog about the course.  Even though we filled out a survey, it doesn't capture the meat of the course on meeting the objectives of the course.  The course objectives were:

Understand theoretical foundations with demonstration of current applications of informatics in health sciences and health care delivery systems.


• Clinical information systems
• Biological information systems (includes Bioinformatics, Pharmacy informatics, and Computational Biology)
• Imaging systems
• Population health information systems (includes consumer health systems)
• Health care management and reimbursement systems

Having read this after we have completed the course, I'm not sure if these objectives correctly reflect what we just went through.  This course was about research methodology, not theoretical foundations.  I'm glad it wasn't about theoretical foundation but I found a lot of the information presented in the course difficult to grasp in a 1 hour lecture.  This course was truly intellectually challenging.  There were days when I got it and others where I left wondering if I would ever understand it.

The subjects discussed that would be covered included:

(1) Research Design
(2) Research Methods in Bioinformatics
(3) Research Methods in Imaging Informatics
(4) Electronic Medical Records and Health IT Research
(5) Decision Support
(6) Data Modeling including standards and ontologies
(7) Cost Effectiveness and Economic Analysis through Informatics for Biomedical Domain
(8) Biostatistics
(9) Medical Education Research
(10) Text Mining

I certainly feel the class nailed these topics and more.  One comment though -- 501 and 502 seem to crossover a lot and I continually have to go back and look at the slides to remember where this was taught and understand the context in which it was being presented.  Maybe it's because some of the same instructors presented in the same class, even sometimes on the same day.

I know I have a lot more to learn about data mining, clustering, classifcation, microarrays, etc but I certainly have a much broader vocabulary due to this class.

All in all, this class gave great exposure to the BMI world but I feel many of the topics presented could have had some lab time to give real world meaning to them, especially the math.  We had 100% lecture and it's really hard to comprehend the concepts from just lecture.  If there is a way to include some sort of lab time to look at microarrays or do some clustering examples with a computer that would help for those of use who are not from this area of expertise.

I wish everyone the best of luck in their future education and profession in BMI.  It's a wide open field and open to creative innovation.  Good luck on the final!!

Posted by   Debbie Carter